Built a Now Playing LED display for Sonos — with song switching, album colors, lyrics display and Lastfm scrobbling

Hi ​@imaginaldisk 

Welcome back to the Sonos Community!

Wow! Great work! Thanks for sharing with the Community!

Personally, I already like what you’ve done - the Now Playing info and the controls feedback is great!

I like this.  I personally would be more interested in displaying what’s currently playing and the source (streaming service) than the lyrics. Being able to switch to ‘lyrics mode’ would be nice to have after that point.

As far as buttons/control, I would want the full suite of typical music controls.  The ability to pause/mute would be highest priority to me personally.  Followed by skip and volume controls.  it would be nice if there were some preset options as well, as I tend to rotate between a few different stations at my desk.

What is the device you’re holding in your hand?  Did you 3-D print a box for the LED matrix? Curious to how this works.

​@melvimbe 

Thanks for the detailed feedback! Displaying what's currently playing is already working — artist, title, album art colors on the LEDs, and progress. I'm planning to let you customize what shows and for how long through the web UI, so you could prioritize now-playing info over lyrics or vice versa.

Pause/mute/volume control actually works already using the remote I showed in the second video. Skip forward/back too. Good to hear those would be the priority controls — that lines up with where I'm headed.

The stations/presets idea is interesting, I hadn't considered that. Would you want the display to show which station you're listening to as well? I could see that being useful — like a little label rotating alongside the track info. Definitely adding that to the list.

When you mention displaying the source/streaming service — could you clarify what you're picturing? Like the display cycling through artist → song title → "Spotify" or "Apple Music"? Or more like a persistent icon or label somewhere? Curious how you'd want that to look.

The device in my hand is an Anticater VK-01 — it's a little BLE knob/remote. As for the LED displays, the one in the first video is a Ulanzi TC001 (8x32), and the bigger one(8x64) in the second video is from a small dev in China. I bought both to test out my custom firmware while I work on designing the final device.

I think this would essentially be the Sonos favorites, which I believe are accessible through the Sonos API.  Perhaps your web ui would provide a list of favorites you’ve created and allow you to assigned them to preset buttons? The logic of how it is named and id is left up to Sonos. Once selected, yes, it would be useful to id the station and and streaming source used..

I really would want a perseistent icon, but I suspect that’s not going to be feasible on a pixel display.

Ok, the LED display explains a bit more of what you’re doing.  I’m more familiar with dumb led matrix products to use with something like WLED, so I couldn’t quite tell how you added housing for the display or where the CPU was.  Now I see that you have an all in wall device that you’re flashing firmware to.  That’s pretty cool.

I want to be honest though, that it’s highly unlikely I would get a device like this.  It’s cool, but I’m several steps behind in terms of what I would do for custom/DIY setups like this.  I honestly haven’t even explored putting a tablet in kiosk mode to use the Sonos app yet to see what I like about that.  If I did want to something more dedicated like that, I would not want to be pixel limited. Have buttons that control the audio in the room is a huge deal, perhaps more desired than the pixel display.  There are remotes available, but they usually require a hub and perhaps more complicated setup.  Something like this would be a nice alternative.

​@melvimbe 

Sonos Favorites is a great call. There are already libraries like node-sonos that make accessing favorites straightforward, so adding preset support shouldn't be too difficult. The idea of assigning favorites to preset buttons through the web UI is exactly the kind of thing I'd want to build.

On the persistent icon — you're right that it's tough on an 8-pixel-tall display, but the final product I'm designing is actually 16x64, which opens up a lot more room. At that size a small Spotify or Apple Music icon alongside the track info becomes very doable.

And to clarify — the end goal here isn't really a DIY kit. I'm designing a custom PCB and sourcing CNC aluminum housings for production. The Ulanzi and the Chinese dev board were just for prototyping and firmware testing. The final device will be a self-contained, polished product.

The processor I'm targeting is a lot more capable than the ESP32s I've been prototyping on, which means things like color extraction from album art, lyrics synchronization(whisper api), and Last.fm scrobbling can all run locally on the device itself — no remote server required. That's important to me because I want it to work entirely on your local network with zero cloud dependency. One of my inspirations was actually Tidbyt, but I was put off when I learned that they are only a cloud-based model.

The remote would dock magnetically on top of the display and detach as a standalone controller. Since the device already talks to Sonos over the local API, it naturally acts as a hub — the remote just needs to connect to it. Setup-wise it already supports automatic multi-speaker detection, so you just pick which room to follow.

I totally get being several steps behind on the DIY front though — the whole point is to make this something you just plug in and it works, no tinkering required.

I like this. I’ve already got a Tuneshine but this would make a cool addition to that.